GE GSS25IYNPHFS fridge noise...

[Bob]

The fridge is only 2 months old.  The noise is an intermittent vibration, like a fan blade is hitting something.  It can be pretty loud.  The noise persists despite opening the doors.

It tends to start out at lower volume and builds to max.  It continues for up to an hour, then abruptly disappears.

It seems to occur most often around the same time in the evening, lasts maybe an hour.  It sometimes occurs once or twice during the day.

On Wednesday, the GE repair guy found an adhesive piece of paper with some thin padding near the condenser fan (the large fan under the fridge) which may have been causing the issue.  The paper looked like left over packaging.

 

The noise occurred again last night, and it is clearly coming from the freezer area, near the top.  My suspicion is that the evaporator fan is the culprit.

Apparently there have been issues with icing on the fan blades, causing interference and/or vibration issues.  

I intend to take a look at it tomorrow.  The intermittent nature and a likely inability to reproduce the noise makes me think that isolating the issue will be tricky.

If I'm lucky, the noise will occur at a time where I can immediately dive in and troubleshoot, but I'm doubtful.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

Bob

[Vance R]

Evaporator fan motor usually stops when the respecitive door is opened. May want to start with the easy test then move on to disassembly and inspection. Just be aware that disassmbly will void your warranty.

Edited November 21, 2020 by Vance R
Added last comment.

[Bob]

Interesting.  I read somewhere that, with most refrigerators, the fan should stop when the door is opened, but mine doesn't.

I would guess that there is no way for someone to determine that I have pulled the cover/etc to look at the fan and assembly, so I'm not concerned about voiding my warranty.

Not easy to get specific info on my model, but I saw something about the fan being variable speed.  

This might contribute to the intermittent nature of the noise: maybe it is quiet at low RPM, but becomes noisy at high RPM.

 

Just thinking out loud.

Bob